Over the recent years, a great deal of effort has been made to estimate age from face images. It has been reported that age can be accurately estimated under controlled environment such as frontal faces, no expression, and static lighting conditions. However, it is not straightforward to achieve the same accuracy level in a real-world environment due to considerable variations in camera settings, facial poses, and illumination conditions. In this paper, we apply a recently proposed machine learning technique called covariate shift adaptation to alleviating lighting condition change between laboratory and practical environment. Through real-world age estimation experiments, we demonstrate the usefulness of our proposed method.

As the VLSI manufacturing technology shrinks to 65 nm and below, reducing the yield loss induced by via failures is a critical issue in design for manufacturability (DFM). Semiconductor foundries highly recommend using the double-via insertion (DVI) method to improve yield and reliability of designs. This work applies the DVI method in the post-stage of an X-architecture clock routing for double-via insertion rate improvement. The proposed DVI-X algorithm constructs the bipartite graphs of the partitioned clock routing layout with single vias and redundant-via candidates (RVCs). Then, DVI-X applies the augmenting path approach associated with the construction of the maximal cliques to obtain the matching solution from the bipartite graphs. Experimental results on benchmarks show that DVI-X can achieve higher double-via insertion rate by 3% and less running time by 68% than existing works. Moreover, a skew tuning technique is further applied to achieve zero skew because the inserted double vias affect the clock skew.

Semiconducting polymers, poly(1,4-phenylene) (PPP) and poly(4-diphenylaminostyrene) (PDAS), which are soluble to organic solvents, were synthesized and were deposited by means of electrospray deposition (ESD). The ESD generated spherical shells of diameters ranging from a few to several tens of microns. The shells consisted of coagulation of nanometric particles of the semiconducting polymers. Formation of the shells was largely influenced by the concentration of spray solution. It was also found that the formation of shells can be achieved with various types of soluble polymers.

An improvement of estimating sound power spectra located in a particular 2-dimensional area is proposed. We previously proposed a conventional method that estimates sound power spectra using multiple fixed beamformings in order to emphasize speech located in a particular 2-dimensional area. However, the method has one drawback that the number of areas where the active sound sources are located must be restricted. This restriction makes the method less effective when many noise source located in different areas are simultaneously active. In this paper, we reveal the cause of this restriction and determine the maximum number of areas for which the method is able to simultaneously estimate sound power spectra. Then we also introduce a procedure for investigating areas that include active sound sources to reduce the number of unknown power spectra to be estimated. The effectiveness of the proposed method is examined by experimental evaluation applied to sounds recorded in a practical environment.

Context-aware applications are a key aspect of pervasive computing. The core issue of context-aware application development is how to make the application behave suitably according to the changing context without coupling such context dependencies in the program. Several programming paradigms and languages have been proposed to facilitate the development, but they are either lack of sufficient flexibility or somewhat complex for programming and deploying. A reference programming model is proposed in this paper to make up inadequacy of those approaches. In the model, virtual tables constructed by system and maintained by space manager connect knowledge of both developer and space manager while separating dependency between context and application logic from base program. Hierarchy and architecture of the model are presented, and implementation suggestions are also discussed. Validation and evaluation show that the programming model is lightweight and easy to be implemented and deployed. Moreover, the model brings better flexibility for developing context-aware applications.

In this paper we unveil basic properties of a code Γq for digital fingerprinting based on a projective plane of order q. We consider a situation where a coalition of malicious users generates a pirated digital content in which a binary sequence w is embedded subject to the marking assumption. Here, the size of the coalition is assumed to be less than or equal to a known constant c ≥ 2. We evaluate the number of candidates of the coalition that can also generate w subject to the marking assumption. It is shown that the number of such candidates is completely determined as a function of w for the case of c = 2. In addition, we give a sufficient condition under which all the malicious users are correctly identified from w for the case of c ≥ 3. Relationships between Γq and other existing classes of codes are discussed as well.

In UWB systems, data symbols are transmitted and received continuously. The Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) processor must be able to seamlessly process input/output data. This paper presents the design and implementation of a continuous data flow parallel memory-based FFT (CF-PMBFFT) processor without the use of input buffer for pre-loading the input data. The processor realizes a memory space of two N-words and multiple processing elements (PEs) to achieve the seamless data flow and meet the design requirement. The circuit has been fabricated in TSMC 0.18 µm 1P6M CMOS process with the supply voltage of 1.8 V. Measurement results of the test chip shows that the developed CF-PMBFFT processor takes a core area of 1.97 mm2 with a power consumption of 62.12 mW for a throughput rate of 528 MS/s.

In Video-on-Demand (VoD) services, the playback continuity is one of the most crucial factors for end-user to judge service quality. It is even more significant than the actual video image quality since new generation VoD users commonly have heterogeneous requirements on service according to their context. Moreover, managing dynamic situations in VoD service is always a challenge, especially in the unpredictable user preferences and network conditions. In this paper, i) Autonomous Decentralized VoD System (ADVODS) has been proposed to satisfy different service quality demands of users and, ii) the Autonomous Node Allocation Technology (ANAT) is proposed for assuring service continuity. With the help of autonomous nodes and mobile agents, ANAT can applies different backup policies to users with different Service Level Agreements (SLA), and dynamically update the backup schema to adapt the changing situations such as various service time or congestion events. Drawing on the evaluation results this paper shows that proposed system architecture has a better performance on streaming service provision and continuity.

Due to the difficulty of test pattern generation for sequential circuits, several design-for-testability (DFT) approaches have been proposed. An improvement to these current approaches is needed to cater to the requirements of today's more complicated chips. This paper introduces a new DFT method applicable to high-level description of circuits, which optimally utilizes existing functional elements and paths for test. This technique, called F-scan, effectively reduces the hardware overhead due to test without compromising fault coverage. Test application time is also kept at the minimum. The comparison of F-scan with the performance of gate-level full scan design is shown through the experimental results.

The wireless robotic sensor network (WRSN) is a combination of a mobile robot and wireless sensor networks. In WRSN, robots perform high-level missions such as human rescue, exploration in dangerous areas, and maintenance and repair of unmanned networks in cooperation with surrounding sensor nodes. In such a network, robots should move to the accident site as soon as possible. This paper proposes a distance-aware robot routing (DAR) algorithm, which focuses on how to pick the shortest path for the mobile robot by considering characteristics different from packet routing. Simulations are performed to demonstrate the benefits of using the proposed algorithm.

This letter presents integrating algorithms for affine constraints defined on a manifold. We first explain definition and geometric representation of affine constraints. Next, we derive integrating algorithms to calculate independent first integrals of affine constraints for the two cases where the they are completely integrable and partially nonintegrable. Moreover, we prove the existence of inverse functions in the algorithms. Some examples are also shown to verify our results.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud computing is emerging as a viable alternative to the acquisition and management of physical resources. The new main feature of IaaS cloud computing is the virtual machine (VM) technology which improves the flexibility of resource management. VMs use virtual machine images that are preconfigured and ready to run. Typically, VM image management uses local file copy and distribution via a network file system (NFS). This potentially means that a more efficient method can be used for VM image distribution. For efficient VM image management, we have designed and implemented a BitTorrent-based network block device (namely, BitNBD) for provisioning VM images in IaaS clouds. The BitNBD mainly provides a 'split read/write mechanism' to deal with concurrent VM instances where the same pieces of a VM are shared. With respect to the legacy BitTorrent protocol, the BitNBD enhances the piece picker policy and energy-saving mode. It is very effective in minimizing VM startup delays and providing a hibernating capability.

This paper presents an efficient ray-launching method for 2D indoor propagation problem, by including crucial multiple reflection effect inside wall. We here focus on the derivation of the reflected and transmitted ray solutions at/through wall when a magnetic source is located in the indoor environment. An efficient approximation, which is called collective ray approximation, is carried out to bundle or collect the internal multiple reflected rays into the primary one. It is resultantly confirmed from the detailed numerical experiments that the derived collective ray solutions can be confidently effective when the internal reflections strongly contribute to the propagation characteristic in the propagation environment, regardless of angle of the incidence.

Recently, Trust has been recognized as an important factor for Grid computing security. In this paper, we propose a trust model in Grid system. It consists of Application Domain (AD), Client Domain (CD), Resource Domain (RD), and Trust Manager (TM). TM controls the relationship between RD and CD depending on the trust level value of each client and classification of each resource. Performance criteria are makespan and utilization. We evaluated our trust model in six scheduling algorithms in nine scenarios. The simulation results show that the proposed trust model improves the performance in all scheduling algorithms.

Transmission coordination mechanism (TCM) aids opportunistic routing (OR) to reduce the total number of packet transmissions and improve end-to-end throughput. Existing paradigms based on batch map partitions packets of communication session into segments, and transmit packet segments in batch mode sequentially. However, the rate of successful transmission coordination oscillates due to the oscillation of the number of packets batch transmitted. In this paper, we propose batch sliding window-based TCM to improve the performance of OR. By transmitting packets in continuous batch mode, batch sliding window-based TCM can hold the rate of successful transmission coordination steady. Simulation results show the average end-to-end throughput gain of the proposed TCM is 15.4% over existing batch map-based TCM.

Routing is still a challenging issue for wireless sensor networks (WSNs), in particular for WSNs with a non-uniform deployment of nodes. This paper introduces a Node Aggregation Degree-aware Random Routing (NADRR) algorithm for non-uniform WSNs with the help of two new concepts, namely the Local Vertical Aggregation Degree (LVAD) and Local Horizontal Aggregation Degree (LHAD). Our basic idea is to first apply the LVAD and LHAD to determine one size-proper forwarding region (rather than a fixed-size one as in uniform node deployment case) for each node participating in routing, then select the next hop node from the size-proper forwarding region in a probabilistic way, considering both the residual energy and distribution of nodes. In this way, a good adaptability to the non-uniform deployment of nodes can be guaranteed by the new routing algorithm. Extensive simulation results show that in comparison with other classical geographic position based routing algorithms, such as GPSR, TPGF and CR, the proposed NADRR algorithm can result in lower node energy consumption, better balance of node energy consumption, higher routing success rate and longer network lifetime.

A novel random number generation method based on chaotic sampling of regular waveform is proposed. A high speed IC truly random number generator based on this method is also presented. Simulation and experimental results, verifying the feasibility of the circuit, are given. Numerical binary data obtained according to the proposed method pass the four basic tests of FIPS-140-2, while experimental data pass the full NIST-800-22 random number test suite without post-processing.

On-line secret sharing scheme, introduced by Cachin, is a computational variation of secret sharing scheme. It supports dynamic changing of access structures and reusable shares, by grace of public bulletin board. In this paper, first we introduce a formal model of on-line secret sharing scheme, and analyze existing on-line secret sharing schemes. As a result, it is shown that they are all vulnerable by giving concrete attacks. Next, we propose a novel on-line secret sharing scheme which is provably secure.

Recently in ad hoc networks, routing schemes using location information which is provided by GPS (Global Position System) have been proposed. However, many routing schemes using location information assume that a source node has already known the location information of the destination node and they do not adapt to large ad hoc networks. On another front, the autonomous clustering scheme has been proposed to construct the hierarchical structure in ad hoc networks and adapt to large ad hoc networks. However, even when the hierarchical structure is introduced, there is some problem. The data delivery ratio becomes lower as the node speed becomes higher, and clusterheads have much overhead in the hierarchical routing scheme based on the autonomous clustering scheme. In order to cope with these problems, this paper proposes a new Hierarchical Geographical Routing with Alternative Paths (Hi-GRAP) using the autonomous clustering scheme and shows the effectiveness of the proposed hierarchical geographical routing in comparison with GPSR, Hi-AODV and AODV through simulation experiments with respect to the amount of control packets and the data delivery ratio.

The Internet has grown extremely fast in the last two decades. The number of routes to be supported by the routers has become very large. Moreover, the number of messages exchanged to distribute the routes has increased even faster. In this paper, we propose SpliTable, a scalable way to support the Internet routes in a Service Provider network. In our proposal, BGP route selection is done by distributed servers on behalf of the routers. They are called route selection servers. The selected routes are then stored in distributed routing tables. Each router maintains only its share of Internet routes, not the routes for each Internet prefix as it is the case today. We adapted the concept of Distributed Hash Tables (DHT) for that purpose. We show analytically that our proposal is more scalable in the number of routes supported in each router than current iBGP route distribution solutions. Moreover, the number of control messages exchanged with our proposal is bounded contrary to current sparse iBGP route distribution solutions which may never converge. We confirm these findings in an evaluation of a prototype implementation.